Skull and Bones wants to be the "best open world pirate experience" out there – can it topple Sea of Thieves?

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It’s funny that Ubisoft is using “long live pirates” as the tagline for Skull and Bones, given that once upon a time the boss of the developer/publisher revealed that a miniscule 5-7% of players on PC actually paid for the company’s products. Whilst I’m sure those figures are better now – DRM does its job, for better or worse – the company still has a long history (and plenty of missing profits) thanks to piracy. So to see the studio knowingly wink and say “long live piracy” is funny.

But that’s probably not Skull and Bones’ biggest problem. The game – which was supposed to launch in 2018, then again in 2019, then again in Ubisoft’s 2020/2021 fiscal year – has had a very difficult development period. And it’s all been fairly public, too. But, gritting their teeth, raising the sails and determined not to be hoisted by their own petards, the staff at Ubisoft Singapore and the publisher at large have persevered and finally got something with the Skull and Bones label ready to play.

In an press-exclusive preview of the game at the tail-end of June, it’s clear that this is not the game that was shown off way back at E3 2017. I played that game; a facsimile of the sailing sections from Assassin’s Creed Black Flag and Rogue, taken out and given some more meat, and wrangled into a multiplayer server. That game was fine. The sort of thing that’d come out, get talked about for a few weeks, then go away.

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